JTF (just the facts): Co-Published by Editions Textuel in 2023 (here), and Silvana Editoriale in 2024 (here). Clothbound hardcover, 22 x 20 cm, 128 pages, with 150 photographs and archival clippings. Includes an essay by Clément Chéroux. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Ruth Orkin was a go-getter. The precocious daughter of a silent film actress and a model boat artisan, she received her first camera (a 39 cent Univex) at age 10. After teaching herself film and darkroom skills during the depression years, she moved to New York City in 1943. Beginning with baby portraits and nightclub photos, she gradually worked her way up the industry ladder. Within a few years she was doing regular assignments for all the major magazines. She traveled widely in the post-war period, shooting numerous portraits and commissions, eventually earning the attention of Edward Steichen who included a series of her pictures in the Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955.
If it had occurred in a slightly later era, that show might have greased Orkin’s entrée into the world of fine art galleries and collectors. But the scene was still in its early development and there wasn’t yet much to plug into. Orkin devoted herself to various projects, including award-winning films with her husband Morris Engel. It wasn’t until 1974 that her still photography finally enjoyed a proper retrospective at Nikon House in NYC. She exhibited later at Witkin Gallery in 1977, taught briefly at ICP and SVA, and published three photo monographs near the end of her life, two of them focused on views out the window from her 15th floor apartment on Central Park West.
Since her death in 1985, Orkin’s estate has been managed by her daughter Mary Engel, who directs the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, which handles her mother’s collection, website, licensing, and sales. The archive proceeded in routine fashion until 2021, when the centennial anniversary of Orkin’s 1921 birthdate spurred a flurry of activity. Since that year, several exhibitions have been organized for the museum circuit, and four new monographs have been published.
The latest book, Bike Trip USA, 1939, serves in both capacities. An exhibition of the work was presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris from September 19th, 2023 – Jan 14th, 2024. An abridged version of the show was published as a small hardbound photobook, with a bicycle patterned cover adapted from fabric designed by Orkin. Both the book and show were curated by Clément Chéroux.
As one might guess from the title, Bike Trip USA, 1939 documents a cross-country journey made by Orkin during the summer of 1939. She departed May 31st from her family home in Los Angeles. Her aim was the World’s Fair in New York City. Never mind the darkening currents of war in Europe. She was a 17-year old American looking to spread her wings before enrolling that fall at L.A. City College. Yellowed news clippings in the book’s first few pages provide a glimpse of her preparation and equipment. She wears a knee-length dress in most photos. Her bike is a 3-speed drop framed cruiser with bull horn handlebars supporting a wire-cage front basket. She appears to carry no helmet, water bottle, road gear, or camping supplies to speak of.
If it seems hard to imagine Orkin cycling 3,000 miles on this contraption, the truth is she didn’t. Most of the cross-country mileage was covered via bus, car, and train, while toting the bicycle along in storage. She stayed in youth hostels along the way. They were just becoming established in the U.S., and her trip became an informal campaign for their advocacy. Once settled in major cities, Orkin used her bicycle as a means of urban exploration. Her trip may have been bike-friendly but the sweeping claim Bike Trip USA is something of a misnomer. During three months of travel, her longest two wheeled outing was perhaps 250 miles over several days, from New York to Boston.
She may not have carried many road accessories, but Orkin was sure to bring another key piece of equipment, a medium format Pilot 6 Single-Lens Reflex. With this camera she made 335 exposures over a three month span. After the trip she printed and pasted them into a scrapbook with handwritten captions. The appendix of Bike Trip USA, 1939 includes a sample page, with a grid of 16 pictures from San Francisco mounted on black matte paper. For the main body of the book, these photo grids are cropped down into single frames, then enlarged to fill a single page. Collected loosely into city-based series, they narrate the sequence of Orkin’s journey from Los Angeles to Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, back through New York, and then Boston. After her care-free summer, she described the grueling 5-day bus ride back to Los Angeles as “like being in a moving prison.”
What kind of photos was she taking on her trip? As she would more fully explore in her late-career monographs, she had a proclivity for elevated views. She aimed her camera down at the street from the upper stories of the Tribune Tower in Chicago, for example, and the Woolworth building in New York.
That said, most of Orkin’s photos were from eye level. Their primary recurring subject? Her bicycle. Her trusty companion is typically shown in fleeting moments or cropped compositions—a frame within a frame, literally—as in a shot of the San Francisco dock yards, or a backward snap of her bike racked to a car traveling east on Route 66. A shot through the handlebars captures the blurry road to Philadelphia, and a few pages later Orkin’s front wheel circumscribes the Washington Monument in the distance. Bike parts are strewn throughout the trip, but they’re especially concentrated in DC where she seemed to take special delight juxtaposing landmarks with her 3-speed. Scrapbook photos catch her bicycle foregrounding the Capitol building, the Ford Theatre, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Supreme Court. It’s a whirlwind tour of national monuments, viewed through a two wheeled prism.
After Orkin hit New York City for the second time in July, her bicycle began to feature less in her photographs. Maybe she had tired of inventing new bike permutations by then? Or perhaps it was just too exhausting to remember her own vehicle in the face of Manhattan traffic. She made half hearted stabs toward her bike, including its frame for example in a leaning glimpse of Wall Street. The vantage is stilted and oblong, as if her attention was diverted elsewhere. It’s easy to imagine her daydreaming about the Big Apple, plotting her eventual move there which would occur just a few years later.
Bikeless snaps of Rockefeller Center and Time Square foreshadow Orkin’s final destination, the 1939 NYC World’s Fair. There she settled in for a few weeks, attending and enjoying the spectacle each day, freed temporarily from her bicycle and the urge to travel. Judging by the five photos including in the book, her photography took a small leap forward at the fair. In these pictures Orkin blends dioramas, crowds, and artificial lighting into wonderful chiaroscuros. They show real photographic promise, and it would be nice to see more. But soon enough she was off to Connecticut, airplanes, and other adventures.
Those adventures would eventually pave the way for a long and successful photo career. For those seeking a quick primer, the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive site covers it well. At this point Orkin’s images have been widely celebrated, analyzed, and collected. With these very early photos now published, the temptation is to look for clues. Can teenage snapshots tell us anything about Orkin’s innate leanings or later development? Were they typical vacation photos of a young dilettante? Or do they reveal hints of genius?
According to Chéroux, the answer might lie somewhere in the middle. “Although the photos seem avant-garde,” he writes, “this is primarily because they are essentially amateur.” Hmm. Several of Orkin’s trip photos do slot nicely into both categories, for example her World’s Fair interiors, and impressionist scenes of Chicago and the Brooklyn Bridge. Still, they seem a long way from the later compositional mastery of, say, American Girl In Florence, Italy (auctioned here in 2022). This is undoubtably Orkin’s most celebrated photo, and Chéroux connects it breezily to Orkin’s bike trip. Both exhibit strains of wanderlust and trailblazing feminism. Not many 17-year olds girls would undertake a solo trip across America in 1939, nor would many single women travel alone to Italy in 1951. Orkin accomplished both with flair.
It’s in that spirit that the book takes a long detour to investigate American Girl In Florence, Italy more fully. The iconic photo is shown in its original sequence with other photos of Ninalee Craig from the series, as they appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine in September 1952. “Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless, and flattering pastime you’ll run into in many foreign countries,” explains the cringeworthy caption. Yikes. Much of the world has evolved from that benighted view (although of course the situation is not yet perfect). For contemporary young women wishing to travel solo, there are fewer potholes now. The road has been paved by pioneers like Ruth Orkin. It’s just a matter of putting one pedal down after another. Bike Trip USA, 1939 shows how it’s done. Glancing at a bicycle in the rear-view mirror, it spies the way forward.
Collector’s POV: The Ruth Orkin archive is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here). Her work is consistently available in secondary markets, in particular in two recent single artist sales at Bonhams (in 2021, results here, and 2022, results here). Prices for her prints generally range from roughly $2000 to more than $50000, with top prices reliably being paid for prints of American Girl in Florence, Italy.
